The Fall of Gaia
by Alioth Merak
Summary: A story set in the very, very distant future of Spira, based on a small change taken to a logical extreme. Crossover between FFX and FFVII, but marked as being a FFX story due to it taking place exclusively in that world, and marked by very few elements of FFVII.
1. Planetfall

**A/N**: In this story, you will see many ideas you recognize, but not a lot of characters you know; this story is set in the distant future, far beyond the scope of human prediction. Our story starts in Spira. It is a vast, changed world, filled with technology and great cities reminiscent of the age of original Zanarkand.

Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter One: Planetfall**

The light peered in through the open windows, and the smell of the ocean and Besaid wildflowers wafted into the room on the morning breeze.

Zeitu awoke, and he cursed to himself as he rolled out of bed. The clock's face showed 8:30AM, and he was suddenly alert. "Shit." He cast the clock a frustrated glance as he hurried to shuffle on his pants. Cyfia, his sister, had laid out breakfast 20 minutes ago, and she brought this to his attention a good 12 times before he had finished and ran out the door and onto the sandy road. The Besaid Environmental Preservation Society had adamantly refused to allow this extremely small swath of beach and jungle to be overrun by the great city which had sprung up all around; every other square inch of the island had been taken by the growing need for space for the city. Zeitu's family had lived at this home on this blessed patch for generations, and were quite wealthy before Zeitu and Cyfia became the final heirs.

In times past, a walk through the wilderness, even a patch of it as small as this sandy road through the jungle and across the beach, would mean battling fiends almost constantly. However, only a hundred years after the beginning of the Eternal Calm, the fiends that had so tirelessly plagued travelers since time immemorial began to appear less and less frequently until they finally stopped showing up at all. Now there was no need for travelers to carry weapons, and Zeitu's trek was entirely uneventful.

Besaid was the smallest of the great cities; where most had at least 8 levels (denoting height) and as many as 20 blocks or more, the city had four levels and was split into nine blocks.

Zeitu worked full time as a antique restoration expert in a small oddities shop on the first level of the city, east block.

He walked through the busy city streets on the lowest level. Machina, hulking masses of metal and gears and wheels that performed various tasks, were speeding down the center of the roads with an incredible amount of noise. Bright lights, neon-hued holographic signs, and the loud grinding of metal against metal filled the dark undercity which served as the main hub for the maintenance robots that ensured the safety of those living on the upper levels and as the main living quarters for those too poor to afford housing in the more luxurious upper levels. Most people lived in the lowest level and took trains, escalators, or stairs to the upper levels where they worked and did most of their shopping.

Just as he had reached his destination and had begun to turn the handle to go inside, a bright red dress caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He turned, and saw a girl he recognized. She was looking with longing at the flowers which sat just inside the front window. He knew this girl well, as he had found himself staring longingly at her from the other side of the glass every morning for as long as he could remember working for the shop. She stopped by the window every day as she walked by, and she never failed to catch Zeitu's attention with the bright dresses she wore. He took a deep breath; he had been preparing for this moment for almost a week, now. "Those flowers are for sale, if you want to buy some," he said, smiling as best he could, nervous as he was. She jumped a bit, not having realized she was being watched. She looked at him, frowning, "I can't afford them."

And this was probably true. If you lived anywhere near the great cities then flowers were a luxury item which normally only those on the upper levels could afford. Having those flowers in the window was an eye-catching device to try to entice customers to visit the store out of curiosity. It was, after all, in exactly the wrong place to advertise the flowers if you intended to sell them; which was why there was no price tag next to the flowers. Zeitu smiled a little wider. "I know a place where the flowers grow, if you want me to you take there," he said in a whisper.

The place was, of course, his house. He'd bring her there on the pretense of seeing the flowers, and then he'd ask if she wanted to stay for tea. She'd meet his sister, and Cyfia has such a way with people that once the girl got caught up listening to Cyfia's stories she'd be there so long that, before she knew it, the whole day would be gone and he could offer to walk her home. He'd had this plan in mind for days, and coordinated it to exactly time with Cyfia's day off and when the flowers were just coming into bloom.

He smiled easier when he saw the brightened expression on her face, "Oh! Of course!" he heard her exclaim, "When?" Zeitu tilted his head towards the store. "Shop closes at eight," he said, grinning. She nodded. "See you then!"

As Zeitu took his seat at his workbench and tuned out the grumpy old store owner, he couldn't help feeling that this would be the best day ever.

The hours that followed were spent in an enamored daze, and Zeitu was too busy daydreaming to notice several important events happening outdoors. As the day waned and the sun was approaching the horizon, a green glow from the east began to wash over the city.. Those on the lower level had no idea what was about to happen, but the upper levels were already beginning to notice the unfamiliar object in the sky."

The entire upper city stood still with fear as the burning object to the east eclipsed the luminous rising moon and cast its green glow halfway around the sky, meeting the sunset's burning red at the middle. The sky turned white, and all gasped or screamed as a surge of blinding light instantly arced upwards from the horizon, permanently blinding everyone who was looking directly at it. The light had struck the huge object, and it had split into billions of shards that, unfortunately, appeared to still be falling to Spira's surface. The shards lit up the night sky as they streaked by overhead, but the crowd soon realized that not all of the material was burning up in the atmosphere and a large cloud of the fallout was heading straight for Besaid, and the crowd slowly began to turn and run, leaving the blind and the weak to be trampled by the maddened stampede of humans. There was a terrible pressure wave and burst of light as the first shard of many to come pierced through the upper-level buildings and vaporized halfway through a major roadway. The sheer kinetic energy ignited the air and was accompanied by an unexpected and terrible green flash of light that sent the entire upper level rippling and groaning under the immense strain. Another shard hit, and then another, and then another, until many thousands of shards, ranging from the size of a gil to the size of a train car were striking the city and the air was filled with a sustained roar as buildings and roads, along with the people in or on them, were destroyed in the massive explosions.

The air was filled with dust and debris, choking Zeitu's lungs, and the many overhead lights from the upper level suddenly shut down, leaving the lower level in sudden darkness. Maintenance robots were shrieking back and forth amidst the falling rubble, throwing themselves over humans in accordance to their programming. Something hit Zeitu's head from behind and he collapsed immediately, the dark world turning to a silent black.


	2. Aftermath

Disclaimer: I don't own FFX or FFVII, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter Two: Aftermath **

When Zeitu realized that he was awake, he forced his eyes firmly shut, afraid to open his eyes again and see how terrible things might look. He lay there, alone, in the ashen silence, feeling the soothing feeling of cold stone beneath his face and taking a mental inventory of all his limbs and extremities. He heard movement to his left, and he slowly opened his eyes. Zeitu made a soft noise as he immediately shut them again in horror. He had seen a a man kneeling over a child's body: a body which had been cut cleanly in half by a falling piece of concrete that had once been a road. He heard shuffling, and then footsteps as the man took the body away. A thick liquid seeped down onto his face, and he slowly opened his eyes again to look above him. A hulking metal construction robot had apparently grabbed girders and formed a triangle over his body, and then held them in place while a huge pile of debris collected over the two of them. Zeitu wanted to thank the robot, but as he tried to find the words, he realized that his savior was no longer functioning. The strain had been too great for the poor thing. He pulled out its memory core and pocketed it. The least he could do.

He was on his feet. He did not remember getting out, nor did he remember when he had started walking, but he needed to leave the city as soon as possible; the pile of wreckage wouldn't hold up forever. He kept his eyes firmly on the ground as he walked, not bearing to bring himself to look up at what could only bring more despair. Footsteps. He turned, looking to see who it was. Brown dress. It was her. He forced a smile, waving meekly. She smiled back, speaking in barely a whisper, "I think I owe you my life. I was considering not coming, but it saved me." Zeitu tilted his head. "Huh?" She held out her hand, "Cirri." Zeitu blinked, "What?" "My name, clueless." "Oh. Zeitu," he said, taking her hand. It was supposed to be a handshake, but he didn't let go.

She didn't seem to mind.

As they reached the edge of the city limits, they were walking among the survivors. Many were injured beyond recovery or insane, and hundreds of people were too shocked to speak. A large group had gathered around a battery radio, a cheap little thing that could fit into your pocket. "The Spiran Republic does not regret the use of Vegnagun II, as the use of it ejected most of the extrasolar object into space and into decaying orbit around Spira." Zeitu wrenched his gaze upwards and gasped in surprise; a ring of rock now spread across the entire sky, glowing bright with a green, burning aura. Every couple seconds, he would see a streak burn up in the sky as another shard entered partially into the atmosphere. If Zeitu were not currently standing in the burning heap that used to be his home city, he might have even called it beautiful. "Reports from military aircraft and local governments are coming in from all across the globe. Early reports estimate that the hardest city hit was Bevelle, due to the combined impacts of the meteorites and the firing of Vegnagun II." An old man spat at the radio, kicking it over with his foot. "Damned Al Bhed. Ever since the New Yevon Party was forced to disband, those idiots have been making too many major decisions without public involvement." "Now, come on," replied another older man as he set the radio upright again, "They obviously didn't have time to get the public involved." "...I still don't like it."

Zeitu tuned out the voices of the old men talking politics, which he had no interest in. Instead, he focused on the radio. "Early studies indicate that the extrasolar object may have been a rogue planet! Fossilized remains found in the center of one of the surviving meteorites show that it may once have contained life! Scientists are already preparing operations for a spacewalk to collect samples from the matter still orbiting the planet."

Cirri still hadn't forced the issue of letting go of Zeitu's hand as they walked back to his home. Truthfully, he was far too worried about his sister to enjoy the moment, but his house was too far away for running to be a viable option and the girl's hand was extremely comforting as they walked. He held his breath as he turned the last corner in the path through the jungle. In just a few more steps, his home would be visible.

"No!" A tall green spire of what looked like some sort of crystal was now jutting straight out of the twisted wood and sandy hill that used to be his family's house. "What is that?" asked Cirri, turning to Zeitu. He didn't know either, but he wasn't going to bother telling her this. No, he was too busy sprinting to the remains of his house. "Sis!" he yelled out as soon as he got within earshot. He continued to yell out for her as he overturned rubble and searched through the remains of his home for any sign of his sister. Frustrated, he turned to face the green spire. He walked up to it, picking up a hefty looking rock and smashing it against the spire in his anger. "Why!?" he asked it. "Why here!? Is this some kind of cruel joke!?"

A large cracking noise drew his attention upwards.

The spire had split cleanly in half, releasing a flood of eerie shrieks and screams. Bright orbs that glowed green began to stream out from it and float upwards towards to the sky before spreading outwards in all directions. He turned around wildly, trying to get a grasp on what was going on. "What the...? Pyreflies?" he thought aloud. Cirri, who had stood at the bottom of the small hill to give Zeitu some time alone, finally came up. "What happened, Zeitu!? What did you do!?" she shouted to him, coming closer to the spire. The lights had completely filled the air above like a bright fog when a few of them started coming down to gather into large, bright, semi-solid spheres a few feet away from them. Cirri and Zeitu stared, struggling to comprehend. Suddenly, with a howl, one of the spheres turned into a monstrous wolf-like creature that spared no time in lunging at them. "Fiend!" Zeitu yelled out. Despite the fact that no one had seen one in years, no one ever could mistake that ancestral feeling of indescribable fear that came with meeting one face to face. He grabbed Cirri's hand and began to run, howling and screeching signaling to him that more fiends had appeared behind him. He sneaked a peek backwards over his shoulder, and immediately regret it. The sight of the hundreds of flying and running fiends slowed his legs with a feeling of inevitability that made escape seem impossible. The color drained from his face as he saw fiends beginning to emerge in front of them. "No!" he heard Cirri cry, and they slowed to a halt, finding that they were surrounded on all sides. Zeitu backed up next to her, raising his fists halfheartedly.

_'We're going to die.'_

But just as the first fiend began to strike and Zeitu closed his eyes in anticipation of pain, he heard a loud male voice crying out from behind; "Lightning!" Thunder and arcs of lightning filled the night air on all sides, and he heard fiends cry out in collective panic as their bodies were destroyed and the pyreflies floated back up into the bright fog above. Zeitu turned around, looking for the source of the voice that had made the pack of fiends reluctant to strike, his eyes resting upon a strangely dressed man garbed in blue, with spiky blond hair and a giant sword that looked like a glowing blue and white tooth. "Who-" Zeitu began to ask, but the man cut off the question with one of his own. "Can you use a sword?" the older, stronger man asked, taking a longsword from a strap on his side and sticking it into the ground beside Zeitu as he turned to face the regrouping fiends that were taking up positions around them. Zeitu shook his head, but he grabbed the sword anyways and turned his back to the older man. "Sorry, I don't carry three," Zeitu heard him say to Cirri, who stood in the middle and picked up a hefty-looking metal rod from the surrounding wreckage that would probably make a good club. "Let's go." The calm in the man's voice filled both Cirri and Zeitu with new confidence in their chances of survival, and the three raised their weapons as the fiends began to draw closer.

**A/N:** Thank you for reading.


	3. Overrun

Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter Three: Overrun**

Whatever solace Zeitu might have gained from the older, stronger man's presence at the start of the battle was slowly beginning to fade as the fight drew on. While the blond Achilles seemed to be able to take on these fiends with little to no effort at all, slicing his gargantuan white and blue blade around with the precision of a razor, Zeitu and Cirri were significantly less able than he and both were taking far too much damage in the fight to continue for much longer. This was made much worse simply by the fact that each fiend that was destroyed burst into the lights which composed its being, which then flew up into the massive cloud of other such lights and reformed again some 10 meters or so away.

And so Zeitu drew his attention to thinking of how they would escape; they could not possibly win under these conditions. No... He doubted that they would be able to defeat these fiends under any conditions. He yelled at the blond man when the circumstances of battle led them to once again come close, "Sir, we have to retreat!" There was a moment of pause, where he and the warrior exchanged glances, and he was relieved to see the man nod. The man turned towards the jungle, putting his hand to his forehead briefly as a faint green light cloaked him: a light very similar to the light which shone across the fiend's backs and composed the green cloud overhead. The next moment was a flash, and Zeitu caught a brief incantation as a fiery blaze cut its way directly through the fiends. But that wasn't all, as the man suddenly turned to Zeitu and Cirri, touching them on the shoulders; "Make _haste."_

A strange feeling surged through Zeitu's body, stemming from the spot where he had been touched and settling in his legs. He felt as light as a feather, and when the man turned around again to run into the jungle, Zeitu followed. His eyes lost track of his peripheral vision as he felt the world melting and blurring around him. Was everything else moving in slow motion? Or was he just moving that quickly? He couldn't believe the speed with which his legs moved, each step slurring into the next as his body automatically performed the task that the mind was too slow to appreciate, and in what felt like seconds they were crashing through the jungle, outside of the range of the green cloud.

There was no denying it now; the man in front of him was some sort of magic user. Magic was a fading art practiced only under the closest of scrutiny by descendents of the talented mages of days past. There used to be a time where anyone could perform magic given the time to study its practice and the aid of a Sphere Grid, but with the advent of guns and machines which circumvented both study and physical training, there was no need for such things. The only working Sphere Grids left were held by the rich, powerful, or extremely lucky. And with the decline of the Sphere Grid, magic users were limited to those who were naturally born with the gift to control creation and were regarded as highly dangerous. While discrimination against mages was illegal, magic was banned under conditions except for emergencies.

Zeitu supposed this was as much an emergency as anything could be.

In time, whatever spell the mage had cast wore off, and they were now jogging into city limits. It occurred to Zeitu that alerting the townsfolk was imperative, but as they had a few seconds to spare, he spoke to the man ahead of him, who was now looking at the destroyed city around them with no apparent emotion on his stoic face. "Thank you for saving us. My name's Zeitu, and this is Cirri." The man turned his head to him very slightly. nodding. "Cloud." It took Zeitu a moment to realize that he was being told the man's name, not being reminded of the encroaching green cloud far behind him. Zeitu mulled over his companion's name for a very short moment; Cloud was an extremely uncommon name. In fact, Zeitu never heard of anyone named Cloud before. Cloud probably had very strange parents if they had given him such a weird name; especially one that took after the weather.

But there would be time to think about that, later. "We have to warn everyone about the fiends coming from the beach; two swords won't be enough to protect the thousands of survivors." Cloud stared at him for a moment before nodding, "Then let's go."

They jogged down the path to the clearing just inside city limits where Zeitu and Cirri had passed through earlier, and many more people had congregated there. It made sense that people would naturally collect where people had already gathered, and they were not surprised to find a huge number of people mulling about in small to large groups. The largest groups were those crowding about radios; with the sphere net down, these devices were the only way of getting information from the mainland. Being a hobbyist item, there were probably several ham radio sets powerful enough to transmit something back, but government aid had yet to arrive on scene. Zeitu saw the mayor in the center of a crowd of people: while she was not nearly as powerful as the central government, she was standing as guide and leader while everyone regrouped. Zeitu dived into the crowd of people, trying to squeeze up to the mayor so he could try and tell her what had happened.

Unfortunately, the fiends had worked faster than Zeitu had anticipated and a wave of screaming people moving away from the jungle's edge sounded their arrival. The people began to twist and shove, moving en masse away from a danger they could not see but did not want to see, understanding instinctively that when people were running one direction it was best to run with them.

But a few people weren't running; a large group of gun-toting soldier-police, along with Cloud, were forming a line against the fiends. Zeitu ran up to join the line next to cloud, wielding his sword and praying that he was making the correct decision in sticking to the man that had seemed so strong earlier. Cirri took a spare gun from a dead soldier and joined them, clearly thinking the same thing. The moment the fiends made their strike, however, they once again they found themselves slowly retreating into the city in the face of the massive onslaught. They would need to find some way of holing up in the massive rubble behind them, or else they would die before the night ended.

They made a full retreat in the face of the encroaching cloud of green light, and found themselves barricaded in an abandoned equipment shop with several soldiers and a small group of civilians. This was not looking well for them, and the sounds of screaming and fighting outside were terrible, but they were safe for now.

**A/N:** Thank you for reading


	4. Eye of the Storm

**A/N:** Schedule has been switched from "never" to "weekly".

Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter Four: Eye of the Storm**

When it looked like the fiends were going to pass by the blockaded equipment shop without fussing too much about trying to break in, and the sounds of fighting outside had moved further on down the street, Zeitu left his position at the door to join Cirri and the other civilians rooting through the equipment shop for supplies.

Cirri had found herself ammunition for her looted submachine gun, and was currently looking through the army surplus clothing for something that fit well enough to replace her tattered red dress which, despite being very fetching, was not proper garb for all the running and fighting she had been doing and had suffered for it.

Zeitu wondered how she could be handling this all so well, when he himself could barely stop his hands from shaking with the adrenaline, fear, and dismay. He had just seen more death in one day than he had ever conceived of in his entire lifetime; excluding his parents, who had died when Cyfia was thirteen and he was just starting primary school, he had never known anyone who had died. He looked at his raw, bloody hands for a moment before forcing the image of the bisected child out of his mind and firming his resolve to deal with the matter at hand.

Zeitu counted the number of people in the room. 7 soldiers, 10 civilian adults, 2 children, Cloud, Cirry, and himself. There wasn't going to be nearly enough food or munitions in this small shop to keep them safe for long if the fiends decided to press the issue of coming inside. The best thing they could do for now is keep quiet and wait for the aid of the Spiran Republic's Al Bhed forces that composed the military; their machina armies were more than capable of fighting the tireless and endless conflict that the glowing fog was imposing on Besaid.

Zeitu turned to face the blonde-haired stranger who was now slumped tiredly against the wall, staring broodingly at his gloved hands. "Cloud?" Cloud's (glowing!?) blue eyes met Zeitu's gaze, the hardened look within signaling very clearly that he did not want to speak at this moment if it wasn't important. "...Never mind, sorry" Zeitu mumbled, walking to the back of the store to find a sphere-net access terminal. He found one. Broken. Well, Zeitu had spent his days fixing things that were in much worse shape at the old man's shop to make them available for sale; while his expertise lay in fixing more archaic forms of equipment, the basic principles would still be the same.

Sphere-net terminals were inactive shells. They were all the hardware and connections to run your computing needs and activated in the presence of a sphere-net key, like the one that was currently a biometric scanning bracelet around Zeitu's wrist. All of the user's account data, programs, storage, personalization settings, etc. were stored in their sphere-net key, which made every single sphere-net terminal the same as every other one: mass-produced passive machina used to conveniently access the data which each user carried with them at all times. Older devices were clunky, requiring the user to insert a valid key physically into the terminal or even go as far as to have on-board data storage and not accept keys at all. The last kind was Zeitu's favorite because fixing one always meant that Zeitu could find the old memories and data of the previous user and feel a sort of connection to them that was deeply cathartic.

Finished with dressing herself in soldier-police issue military surplus, Cirri was watching as Zeitu quietly while he dug around in the innards of the terminal. He was ripping out the now-useless net-connections and using a small soldering tool to create some ad-hoc wiring to bypass the payment-collection box and to allow him to jump the terminal with an external power source. Luckily there were plenty of power options, this being an equipment shop, and he was able to get the terminal online after only an hour or so of determined labor.

"Okay, so you got the thing working, but the sphere-net is down. What are you gonna do?" Cirri asked quietly as Zeitu waved his spherenet-key by the side of the terminal to engage the wireless connection and pull up his desktop. Zeitu pulled the memory core out of his pocket, showing it to Cirri. "A machina saved my life, but was rendered nonfunctional in the attempt. I'm going to see if the personality programming on its memory is still there and install it onto my spherenet-key. It's the least I can do for it." Cirri tilted her head slightly. "Really? It's just a machina. It was doing it's job, and it's not like it can understand your gratitude." This stung Zeitu a bit. "Machina have feelings, you know. They release pyreflies when they're destroyed. Haven't you heard the theories? Personally, I believe the reason why the fiends disappeared is because the machina we use started to use pyreflies as a power source. With all the machina being made at any given moment, souls never have a chance to grow restless and become fiends, and are instead being put to work maintaining our roads and cities and making our lives easier. Enslaving the dead to serve the living." Zeitu couldn't help but feel a little mad at Cirri, even if his was a dying point of view and he could understand why she'd feel the way she did. She looked a little put off, "Does that make you a member of the New Yevon party? They used to say that a lot before they disbanded."

Zeitu turned to Cirri. He had been working the whole time, and the memory dump of the construction robot was now downloading onto his spherenet-key. "I'm not all that into politics. All I know is that facts certainly seem to point to that conclusion, which means that machina probably have souls and feelings, even if they can't express them."

It was at this point that Cloud stood up and walked over to them, and Zeitu and Cirri instantly silenced in his presence. His expression still looked brooding, but also curious. "Pyreflies? And why are you mispronouncing machine?" Zeitu looked at him quizzically. "No one's called them machines for a thousand years or so." The Al Bhed, at the start of their rise to political power, had called them machines for a while to try to convince people to forget the past to move on, but people had stuck to the use of the word machina and after a while it stopped mattering. But before Zeitu could explain this, Cloud had mumbled to himself "a thousand years?" and wandered away to resume his thinking. Zeitu's mouth pulled up in a confused half-smile. What, was Cloud implying that he was some kind of time-traveler or something?

But then... he was awful strong for the average person, and possessed magic. These kinds of things were pretty strong evidence of some kind of sphere-grid, and if Cloud were a time-traveler that would handily explain both the possession of a sphere-grid, his strength, his magical powers, and why he seemed so confused about the subject at hand. Time-traveling wasn't even unprecedented; after all, many suspected Grand Summoner Yuna's husband of having been a time traveler himself: a resident of Zanarkand of 2000 years ago.

But then again, that was ridiculous... wasn't it?

A loud beeping from his wrist indicated to him that the download was complete and he turned back to the terminal to inspect the memory core's contents. He was saddened to discover that the memory-dump of the poor thing's personality was corrupted, and he couldn't access it. Still, it was on his spherenet-key now, and he'd never not have it if he ever got the time to fix the errors. Assuming he lived long enough to try.

His odds were looking good, though, with a powerful warrior at his side and several trained soldier-police surrounding him. And, as it turned out, he apparently had some kind of knack for the longsword that Cloud had handed him because for some reason whenever he picked it up he felt invigorated and strong. He picked it up and swung around a few times, noticing several purple glowing spheres embedded into the blade. Weird... What were those?

There was no time to examine them closer, though, because it was at this moment that there was a sudden thunderous boom against the blockaded door of the equipment shop. Damnit, were they ever going to catch a break? The civilians crowded at the back of the shop, hiding behind the counters and inexpertly pointing their guns at the front of the store. The military-police soldiers formed up in front of them, crouching, and ready to throw their life down to protect those behind them. Cloud stood dead center of the room, calmly taking out his great glowing tooth of a sword and staring quietly. Zeitu semi-confidently stood next to him, to both of their surprise. "Save your ammo. We've got this," Zeitu said to the soldier-police behind him, forcing himself to sound more sure than he was. Cloud almost cracked a smirk at this. Cirri took up position at Cloud's other side, holding her submachine gun up to her shoulder. "Well, we've fought them before, at least, and we've got at least an hour of experience up on anyone else here."

The barricade burst open.

**A/N:** Thank you for reading.


	5. Behemoth

**A/N**: Chapter late due to revisions to other chapters. My apologies.

Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter Five: Behemoth**

There was no time for Zeitu to try to evaluate the situation before a great snarling Behemoth had its claw reaching through the door in an attempt to grab a delicious looking victim. Cirri was the first to react, and the report from her gun was unexpectedly loud in Zeitu's ears in these tight quarters. Cloud, seeing a moment's opportunity in the Behemoth's startled withdraw from a source of sudden pain, leaped forward with his sword in hand, pulling the two-handed sword's great blade horizontally to slice off the fiend's hand. The blade caught into the extremely tough bone of the great creature, and Cloud was drawn forward in his attempt to wrench the blade free of rapidly healing flesh. It was at this time that Zeitu's brain decided to remember that he was supposed to be fighting alongside them, and he found himself beginning to move unusually dextrously as he charged into battle, rolling forward to dodge the Behemoth's other fist crashing through the front wall of the equipment shop and letting it pass over his body as it reached at Cloud to try to pull him off. Zeitu decided to stay down for the moment as a volley of bullets from the back of the store buried themselves into the flesh of the fiend's left arm, which was currently above him.

The large beast pulled itself up into a standing position outside of the equipment shop, dragging Cloud, still trying to pull out his sword, out with its arms and allowing the smaller fiends room to leap through the huge hole that used to be a wall and attack the civilians. Zeitu was swiftly on his feet again, slicing through two of the fiends and leaping out into the street to try to help Cloud or at least get him out of the soldier-police's line of fire. Cirri was soon out there with them, laying down covering fire in a perimeter around the fight with the Behemoth while a sudden burst of flame saw Cloud's sword explosively ejecting from the creature's right arm, blowing off its right claw in the process.

A peculiar glowing white wind swirled around the beast, cauterizing the stub that used to be its hand as it roared in pain. An answering roar from down the street signaled to Cloud, Zeitu, Cirri, and the entrenched people inside the shop, that the Behemoth was not alone and that a tactical retreat might be in order. The solider-police needed no prompting, providing a zone of safety as they led the civilians down an alleyway out the back door of the equipment shop and marking up the three fighters in the street as either necessary losses or strong enough to take care of themselves. Zeitu, on the other hand, was determined not to run until at least this Behemoth was dead; otherwise, it would probably just follow them and they'd find themselves in the same situation all over again. He glanced over at Cirri, and the look on the girl's face eliminated all hope of convincing her of running away with the civilian group.

He hadn't noticed it before, but in these fights, Cirri seemed to dive straight into battle and, in some way, find some sort of calm or satisfaction from participating. While he found his thoughts drawn to the idea of running, and it was only the self-convinced belief that near Cloud and fighting was the safest location in the middle of this green fog that kept him here, she seemed to relish the battle for its own sake. Not to mention, she seemed to hold the gun naturally and clearly had had some sort of training with firearms. She wasn't the girl he had imagined in his head from across the glass.

This train of thought was interrupted when Cloud's blade took advantage of an opening in the Behemoth's defenses, his hands expertly maneuvering the massive sword into an upward slash that found the fiend's good arm lacking a critical motor-nerve that left its left arm limply hanging. The white wind started to pick up again and surround the damaged body part, and Zeitu decided to make a bet on the idea that the wind was some sort of spell that the beast was casting. And, while the beast was focused on casting that spell, and Cloud was providing a distraction by trying to maneuver into a position to take out one of the beast's legs, and Cirri was still holding a line by gunning down any of the smaller fiends that came too close, Zeitu would find his chance to hopefully strike through. Using the flat side of his longsword to bash a fiend he was fighting at the moment away from himself, he charged forward straight at the Behemoth, surprising himself once again by being able to predict the beast's telegraphed right-armed stump-thrust. He leaped in the air in anticipation, launched himself off the top of the beast's arm, and dug his longsword directly into its eye, twisting it and closing his own eyes to try to block out the disgusting image of seeing a living being having its skull pierced with a blade. The creature exploded into pyre-flies and small meteors, breaking Zeitu's arm and blowing away a large swath of fiends.

Zeitu was on the ground, writhing in pain when Cloud was suddenly beside him. "Good work, _Cure_, we have to move. Let's go!" Zeitu was about to tell off Cloud for being so demanding of him when he was clearly wounded, but with a gasp he felt his arm bones snapping painfully back into place and the wound sealing with an excruciating burning sensation. Cloud pulled Zeitu up onto his feet, and Zeitu picked up his longsword as he ran to follow after Cloud and Cirri into the alleyway before the other Behemoth could show up.

Cloud looked extremely tired. He was clearly trying to hide this fact from Zeitu and Cirri, but despite his attempts to cover up his exhaustion, his movement was sluggish. Zeitu looked at his sphere-net key to check the time, wondering how much longer they could repeat this cycle of run-fight-run before they eventually dropped dead from lack of energy, and found himself staring at a malfunctioning piece of equipment. The thing was sparking erratically and glowing with a faint green aura, and Zeitu surmised that it had absorbed some of the energy from the Behemoth's death throes and was on the fritz. It didn't look broken, per se, but it would take more time than Zeitu had at the moment to figure out what was wrong with it and get to work repairing it.

"Cloud, are you okay? You don't look so good," Cirri whispered to Cloud after they had found a small, vacant alleyway with easy escape routes and cleared it of fiends. "It's much harder to cast than normal," was Cloud's response as he looked to eight glowing, colored orbs running down the center of his blade. Zeitu recognized a purplish colored orb that looked a lot like the four orbs running down the center of his own blade. "Hey, wait, what are those spheres in these swords, anyways? I've never seen anything like them before." Cloud looked surprised for a moment, then suddenly nostalgic and melancholy, and then stoic as the mask went back on. "They're materia. Condensed mako that let you tap into the knowledge of the Planet." Zeitu and Cirri both stared at Cloud with bemused looks on their faces and were met with a concerned and brooding stare in return. After a moment of silence, Zeitu broke it with "It looks like there's a lot that needs to be explained, here."

"Yeah," was Cloud's only reply.

**A/N:** Thank you for reading.


	6. Tides

**A/N**: If you've made it this far, do consider leaving me a review! They're very encouraging, and any constructive criticism is _extremely_ welcome.

Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.

**The Fall of Gaia**

**Chapter Six: Tides**

"So let me get this straight, Cloud. You're an alien who _just so happens _to be humanoid _and _speak English. You come from a planet called Gaia, which we've decided is most likely the same planet whose rubble is now orbiting Spira. This planet of yours was not only _alive_, but _sentient_, capable of imparting knowledge through mako, a physical form of something called the Lifestream, which is _literally its blood or soul or something_. You fought a guy named Sephiroth, who's plan was to hijack this Lifestream and fly the planet through space."

After Zeitu finished venting, Cloud very slowly nodded.

"Well... shit. The fact that you're here means you lost, I guess?"

Another slow nod. Cloud's eyes were downcast, fixated on the ground.

Zeitu looked up at the wreckage of the city above them, his thoughts turning to the beautiful, glowing, green circle of rock and light that lay beyond. It seemed... strange, to think that something so inherently terrible and wondrous was the literal obliterated corpse of another planet. One that had once held humans. Humans that were, ostensibly, from the same place Spirans were from. They did speak the same language, after all. And somewhere, in the aftermath of all that destruction, some god of a man named Sephiroth probably still lived: the instigator and deliberate mastermind behind the whole event. What might have become of Spira if Vegnagun II hadn't been fired?  
Come to think of it, were they much better off now? These fiends couldn't just be a local event now that it seemed they were a product of this mako business. Is that why help was so slow to arrive? Was the entire world fending off armies of fiends? Zeitu shivered for a moment with fear. How were they going to survive this?

Cirri, who had been carefully keeping an eye on exit of the alley for packs of fiends, suddenly yelped, drawing both Cloud and Zeitu out of their thoughts. "Water!" Zeitu only had a moment to wonder what she meant before a distant rushing noise alerted him to what sounded like a _lot_of approaching water. '_Oh shit_.' Of course. The sudden appearance and destruction of a _planet _couldn't have had no effect on the tides. They barely had time to clamber up the side of a wrecked building before about three feet or so of water came rushing through the streets below. "We have to get to the upper levels or we're going to end up drowning," Cirri said, looking around them for some kind of way up from their vantage point. "Looks like there's a stairway column to the east. We'll need some way of getting there."

The water was rising rapidly, and the column looked impossibly far away, but Zeitu was quickly learning that the word "impossible" meant "try harder," and he broke out into a run, leaping off the edge of the building and managing to grab the edge of the neighboring one to pull himself up. "Come on!" he called back to the others, and they quickly followed. It was in this manner that they found themselves at the staircase; bloody-handed and bruised from repeated impacts with hard concrete.

Then began the slow climb up the great, wide staircase that had daily borne the weight of hundreds of workers, and Zeitu wondered just how much of the upper levels they'd find still standing after the events that had occurred only a day before. Had it really only been one night? Had the sun even come up, yet? Zeitu's stomach turned over. Less than 12 hours. That's all it had taken for this Sephiroth guy to completely destroy everything that Zeitu had ever known.

He glanced over to Cirri. How was she handling all this so well? Her stoic face reminded him vaguely of Cloud; if all this was disturbing her, she was holding it all inside. If anything, she seemed to become more withdrawn with each step.

"Cirri. You okay?"

"Yes. I'm fine."

"No. You're not fine. I can tell."

"If you weren't going to believe my answer regardless, why ask the question?"

"I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about it. You're not alone, you know."

"I know I'm not alone. If I wanted to talk about it, I would have. Just drop it, alright?"

Zeitu stared at the two people to his right. Was he really the only person who wanted to talk about this? Didn't she realize that maybe _he_was the one who felt alone, here? With friends (could he even really call them friends?) like this by his side, it was suffocating silence at all times.

"Cloud-"

"Zeitu. I'm sorry, but not now. I've got a lot on my mind."

And that was that: back to suffocation. Zeitu looked down off the side of the railing just in time to see the tops of the buildings below disappear under the water and he felt sick again. '_The others...' _Seriously. How could he be the only one who desperately wanted to let all this out? He wasn't used to not having anyone to talk to: he had always had his sister. _'Oh no... Cyfia... How could I have forgotten about you, even for a second? Where the hell are you?'_ He felt a pang of guilt. How _had_ he forgotten about his sister, even in all this mess? With the waves coming in to sink Besaid Island, there might not even be a body left to bury. He hoped desperately that she was alive, somewhere.

With nothing else to turn to, he looked to his sphere-net key and saw it was still faintly glowing green, humming strangely, the screen blank. He choked for a second, running his fingers through his hair and touching the device to his temple in frustration and anguish. '_ I can't even imagine how I'm going to fix this stupid thing, And even if I did, I don't have a terminal to work on it with._'

_'THANK YOU.'_

**A/N: **Thank you for reading.


End file.
